Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: sanatorium

  • Vampires and the Tuberculous Family

    Sylvia Pamboukian Moon Township, PA   Public health poster, New York National Child Welfare Association, ca. 1920–23. Library of Congress “The Tuberculous Family.” Listed by Library of Congress website with “No known restrictions on publication” An isolated village, a series of mysterious deaths, a mob in the graveyard at midnight—it sounds like the climax of…

  • Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: About a whistling pneumothorax and pulmonary tuberculosis

     Peter Korsten  Göttingen, Germany   Thomas Mann, 1937 Photo by Carl van Vechten Originally intended as a novella, Thomas Mann’s (1875–1955) multilayered novel The Magic Mountain documents in fine detail the methods used to treat lung diseases and especially pulmonary tuberculosis at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mann’s protagonist, Hans Castorp, who intended to spend…

  • Therapeutic beauty

    Elizabeth LeeCarlisle, Pennsylvania, United States A longer version of this article was published in American Art, Volume 18, Number 3. © 2004 by The University of Chicago Press. In the late 1880s, the painter Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921) and his family began summering in rural Dublin, New Hampshire, near his childhood home in Keene, where…